Wednesday, November the 10th, 2004

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Notes on Jellyfish

There came a time when Marigold Chew, growing exasperated by Dobson's listlessness, encouraged him to get involved in amateur dramatics. The out-of-print pamphleteer formed a group entitled the Jellyfish Players, and issued a prospectus, hoping to gain bookings in various derelict seaside theatres during the winter months.

The company's first production was Strange And Poisonous Aquatic Beings, a loose adaptation of ex-hostage Brian Keenan's book An Evil Cradling. In Dobson's hands, out went the Celtic, bardic posturing, the romanticised vision of an intense poetic response to a terrible ordeal, and in came gnomic, baffling speeches which appeared to have more to do with life on the ocean floor than with a claustrophobic Beirut cellar. The production closed after two nights, and Dobson and his cohorts were chased out of town by an enraged groupuscule called the Children Of Hibernia, fanatical mystics who had acclaimed the bearded figure of Keenan as their prophet.

Back home, Marigold Chew tried to point out to Dobson the gravity of his miscalculations, and had him read many stupendous tomes on dramatic theory. She was not aware, however, that in the middle of the night, by torchlight, Dobson was devouring Victorian melodramas and French farces by the dozen.

The following winter, somehow managing to commandeer an end-of-the-pier playhouse in Vug-By-The-Sea, the Jellyfish Players unveiled a four-hour show entitled My Plankton Theory. Dobson's foolish friend Boloslav Carnegieguggenheim had a hand in the playscript, which one critic described as “outright gibberish”. When the players took to the stage for the first night, dressed up to the nines in hand-sewn lobster costumes, they were disconcerted by the audience, which reacted to the broad, knockabout comedy as if it were the most harrowing of tragedies. Several theatregoers in the front row sat sobbing, convulsed by grief, and one eyewitness told the local newspaper that there was gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in the upper circle.

Despite this misunderstanding of his intentions, Dobson kept the show running for eleven months, even when nobody actually turned up to watch. Only when he was hospitalised following a mishap with a drenched and disorientated trumpeter swan did the play close. By the time he recovered, Dobson had become so obsessed with his investigations into the fatal Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash that he abandoned his dramatic ambitions for evermore, and his amanuensis Marigold Chew made no attempt to revive them. Instead, she devoted her energies to potato gardening, and was awarded many, many glittering prizes.